Good vibrations? Oil, gas exploration trucks coming to a neighborhood near you

JOSHUA POLSON/jpolson@greeleytribune.com
Vibrator trucks park by homes Wednesday morning along 13th Street as they take readings throughout the Greeley area. The trucks vibrate the ground to map out areas beneath the surface helping find oil and gas deposits and helping companies plan how to reach them.

JOSHUA POLSON/jpolson@greeleytribune.com
Bob Smith, operations manager with Geokinetics, looks at a map of Greeley showing the areas that the vibrator trucks have yet to reach while at the Mineral Resources office at 5200 20th St. Wednesday morning in Greeley. Geokinetics hopes to have the semismic mapping finished by early May.

JOSHUA POLSON/jpolson@greeleytribune.com
A vibrator truck parks in front of an empty home Wednesday morning off of 13th Street in Greeley. The vibrations sent out by the truck are set specifically so they do not damage homes or businesses.

Two different convoys of vibrating trucks are slowly making their way east to west across Greeley. They will generally operate from 7 a.m.-7 p.m. seven days a week. The crews are, however, sensitive to school zones before and after school hours, and also will stay away from churches during services.

Officials say the feeling of the vibrations are more like a big truck driving by. Officials along the route closely monitor buildings to make sure the vibrations aren’t more than buildings can handle.

Residents are encouraged to call one of three 24-hour hotlines to have their questions or concerns answered: (970) 590-6373; (970) 590-0343 or (970) 590-2638 for Spanish speakers.

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It was just after the Boston Marathon bombing.

Residents around Greeley noticed the yellow boxes, with cables, strategically placed along the north-south avenues of downtown Greeley.

Shortly thereafter, the massive trucks with the 60-inch wheels began rumbling through neighborhoods with a police escort, and men in orange vests were roaming from house to house along the routes with handheld meters and clipboards.

As these strange scenes unfolded, the earthquakes came, sending some into a panic. Others just enjoyed the ride.

“It was like, everyone stopped eating for a moment, you know,” said Mike Webb, who recently opened a Subway franchise downtown at 1011 9th Ave.

About 2:30 p.m. Tuesday, the freshly painted walls of the new downtown eatery shook for about a minute.

“Everyone was like, ‘What was that?’ So we all had to go outside and look,” Webb said. “It got everyone’s attention. They all had big eyes, like something disastrous was happening.”

But it is just the latest technology that residents unfamiliar with oil and gas exploration must endure through mid-May in a continued effort by a company to maximize chances to find those resources beneath the ground.

In a scene almost reminiscent of the Transformers, the three military-type trucks rise slowly as they stamp the ground with large metal plates beneath them. The operation involves bouncing sound waves in six, 12-second sweeps through those plates. The vibrations rumble through the ground and shake walls; Wednesday morning, in the nearby No. 3 ditch, it sent ripples off the concrete sides as the water rushed eastward.

After their “sweep,” the trucks move a few feet west, and the process starts all over again in their search for a 3D image of the subsurface geologic formations.

“We know it’s down there, we’re looking for structural (formations) so if there’s a huge fault (for example), we can plan around it,” said Tyler Richardson, of Mineral Resources Inc., the Greeley-based company spending in excess of $2 million on this month-long operation.

The idea is to map the subsurface of 22.5 square miles, essentially around much of Greeley and Evans city limits, west to 71st Avenue. The information will be used not only by Mineral Resources, which has drilling plans at sites throughout Greeley, but many other oil and gas exploration companies who may need it in the future. That means this block-by-block ground thumping only has to happen once, Richardson said.

The convoy of trucks will amble along from east to west, sending vibrations into the ground. The sound bounces off the geophones placed 165 feet apart on the north-west streets throughout the city in small but curious piles of plastic boxes, cables and sandbags, which at first prompted many calls to the police after the Boston bombing.

The operation is being carried out by Houston-based Geokinetics, with the help of Urban Seismic Specialists, also from Texas. It’s the same operation they’ve run throughout Weld County and even Los Angeles.

During its Wednesday morning sweep along 13th Street, few nearby residents even noticed the convoy or resulting vibrations.

For Webb and his customers on Tuesday, however, it was a bit more obvious.

“My first impression was some bulldozer was driving by outside, and then it felt a little like an earthquake,” Web said of the minute-long event. “I enjoyed it.”

Bob Smith, project manager for Geokinetics, said that is the most common reaction to their work. Typically, crews drag the geophones along the ground along a string of cables in more rural settings. But in more urban areas, their equipment is wireless, all radioed live to control trucks at Mineral Resources’ headquarters at 5200 20th St., in Greeley.

“This is the latest technology,” Smith said. “This recording system we have now is completely wireless. It’s perfect for this environment.”